Author Archives
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Analysis of Lars Gustafsson’s The Stillness of the World Before Bach
This poem (Världens tystnad före Bach) appeared in Swedish in Lars Gustafsson’s poetry collection of the same title in 1982, at the mid-point of the poet’s literary career to date. Over the past 50 years, Gustafsson has experimented with many… Read More ›
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Analysis of Osip Mandelstam’s The Stalin Epigram
This precisely executed image of Stalin and his reign of terror led to Osip Mandelstam’s arrest and exile and ultimately to his death in the gulag. After sharing this poem (“My zhivem, pod soboiu ne chuia strany”) with a small… Read More ›
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Analysis of Hagiwara Sakutarō’s Spring Night
Although it is not one of Sakutarō’s more harrowing compositions and does not contain the nightmarish imagery of so much of his poetry, Spring Night nevertheless creates a hauntingly melancholic mood by employing visual imagery to evoke the mystery of… Read More ›
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Analysis of Cesare Pavese’s South Seas
This was Pavese’s first successful poetic composition. In South Seas (I mari del Sud) are three qualities evident in many of his later poems: Pavese’s effort to create a “poem-story” (poesia-racconto); the poet’s choice of conventionally “unpoetic” subject matter (lower-class… Read More ›
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Analysis of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus
Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (Die Sonnette an Orpheus) comprises 55 sonnets in two series. The first series (Erster Teil) contains 26 poems; the second (Zweiter Teil), 29. Poet and translator Willis Barnstone provides a breezy but comprehensive 97-page… Read More ›
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Analysis of Tanikawa Shuntaro’s Sonnet 41
While Tanikawa is not the first Japanese poet to use the sonnet form, he has made unique contributions to the sonnet genre through his 62 Sonnets (62 no sonetto), in which the poet seems to have used the form of… Read More ›
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Analysis of Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino: An African Lament
First composed in 1956 in Acoli, a Ugandan language, Okot p’Bitek converted this book-length poem into English, and it was published a decade later. The author’s note informs readers that the English-language version “clipped a bit of the eagle’s wings… Read More ›
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Analysis of Fadwa Tuqan’s Song of Becoming
Fadwa Tuqan wrote Song of Becoming in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War that resulted in the defeat of the tripartite Arab coalition (Egypt, Syria, and Jordan) by Israel. The defeat also meant that the Palestinian struggle against dispossession,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Jorge Luis Borges’s A Soldier of Urbina
“A Soldier of Urbina,” from El otro, el mismo (The Self and the Other, 1946), is typical of Borges’s mature poetry. Classical in structure and containing both historical and literary allusions, it is also an outstanding example of Borgesian metaphysics…. Read More ›
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Analysis of Mahmud Darwish’s A Soldier Dreams of White Tulips
This popular poem by Mahmud Darwish has had more than one translation in English. It is a striking poem and rare in its subject matter. It humanizes the enemy and, more specifically, the soldier enemy who invades one’s country. In… Read More ›
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Analysis of Tarjei Vesaas’s Snow and Spruce Forest
Tarjei Vesaas’s Snow and Spruce Forest Talk about what home is — snow and spruce forest is home. From the very start it is ours. Before anyone has told us that it is snow and spruce forest, it has its place in… Read More ›
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Analysis of Nicolás Guillén’s Small Ode to a Black Cuban Boxer
This poem from the collection Sóngoro consongo (1931) is an outstanding example of Nicolás Guillén’s poetry, reflecting both his Afrocentrism and his nationalist response to U.S. imperialism. The poem was inspired by and written for featherweight champion Eligio Sardiñas Montalvo…. Read More ›
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Analysis of David Dabydeen’s Slave Song
David Dabydeen wrote the 14 poems that Slave Song comprises while an undergraduate at Cambridge University. The set of poems won Cambridge University’s Quiller-Couch Prize and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1978. Several individual poems were published before their collective… Read More ›
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Analysis of Niyi Osundare’s Siren
Siren, from Songs of the Marketplace, Niyi Osundare’s first collection, has eight stanzas. It describes the visit of typical Nigerian politicians to rural dwellers. The poem takes its title from the police car siren whose blaring traditionally announces the presence… Read More ›
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Analysis of Han Yongun’s The Silence of Love
Han Yongun’s The Silence of Love Love is gone, gone is my love. Tearing himself away from me he has gone on a little path that stretches in the splendor of a green hill into the autumn-tinted forest. Our last… Read More ›
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Analysis of Giuseppe Ungaretti’s Shout No More
Giuseppe Ungaretti’s Shout No More Stop killing the dead, don’t shout anymore, don’t shout if you still want to hear them, if you hope not to pass on. They have the imperceivable murmur, they make no more noise than the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Gabriele d’Annunzio’s The Shepherds of Abruzzo
This is the first of seven poems grouped under the heading Sogni di terre lontane (Dreams of Distant Places), which are part of d’Annunzio’s poetic masterpiece Alcyone (Halcyon). If the entire work is a passionate celebration of the summer and… Read More ›
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Analysis of Pablo Neruda’s Sexual Water
Among many cultures, the powers of seduction and destruction are sides of the same coin. In Sexual Water, from the second volume of Residencia en la Tierra (Residence on Earth), Pablo Neruda imbues the force of water with an erotic,… Read More ›
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Self-Portrait is a poem published in Yun Dong-ju’s only collection of poetry, The Sky, the Wind, the Stars and Poetry. This collection, published after his death in 1948, includes 12 poems found posthumously as well as 19 poems he had… Read More ›
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Analysis of Carlos Germán Belli’s Segregation
An early poem, Segregation represents Peruvian Carlos Germán Belli’s role as a nexus among the Latin American avant-gardes, the poetry of social concerns, and his own later, formally complex neoclassical verse. Belli uses short arte menor verses (fewer than eight… Read More ›